Ultima creator Richard Garriott is no stranger to controversy. Although he's a foundational progenitor of early computer RPGs, his newer releases haven't had nearly the level of impact as his early work and his stances on stuff like NFTs and AI haven't all been particularly well-received.
In a recent appearance on the TechJesse podcast, Garriott wades into the shark-infested waters that is AI discourse in the games industry. The proliferation of AI data centers is one of the main factors driving up hardware prices, but the more existential threat is job displacement, a fear shared across many industries. Game studios big and small are increasingly using AI to streamline development, and in even more controversial cases generate actual assets and "vibe-code" entire projects, which of course means fewer human jobs. For people like Garriott trying to cut down on development costs, that's not such a bad thing.
"This is super controversial, so half your people listening here are going to hate me, [but] AI is really helping," says Garriott. "Now, I can be closer to the creation. Now, we need fewer people and less time to make it. And as much as, by the way, there are real issues with AI, like is it plagiarizing work from other places we think is real? And if we use it for voice, who those voices train on. And so, ethical use of AI is really an important issue, and I'm not trying to say I've solved that, but we're trying. We're trying to make sure we do use it ethically.
"However, if you're just talking about the mechanics of how fast can you make a game, our last game, Shroud of the Avatar. has persistently had at least a bug count of a thousand bugs all the time ... there are some bugs that were on there for three to five years that have never been addressed because they weren't seen as high priority ... Now, with AI, those bugs are fixed as soon as they're found, within an hour of them being found."
Garriott reports that due to these advancements in AI-powered bug detection and elimination, "Shroud of the Avatar, for example, now has zero bugs, every day. Zero."
Garriott's bullish stance on AI aside, his claim that Shroud of the Avatar suffers from zero bugs in its current state is notable considering the game's poor performance reputation. Although it's been out for eight years now, Shroud of the Avatar is still getting regular updates, which are likely the culprit when it comes to new bugs.
In terms of those new updates, Garriott says "humans do the art and machines can help do the labor that ensures that all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed and so it's stable, fast, and fun for the users get to play it."
